High King Maulgar

It should be no surprise to anyone reading this blog that my guild is not an end game progression guild. I haven’t seen Illidan or Archimonde other than in Warcraft3, heh.

Our guild isn’t very big, and attempts to stay casual by nature. And by casual, I mean in playtime and raiding schedule only. When we are online and raiding, we play and raid to win. We are currently running 2 Karazhan groups and clear Kara weekly. We have only been seriously putting forth effort in raiding since early June. All in all, I’m pretty happy with our progress.

Now, we are turning our eyes towards the 25 man raids. Our roster still isn’t full enough to do guild only 25 mans, so we joined forces with another guild for our first ever attempts on High King Maulgar and Gruul.

I’m happy to report that we downed HKM on our 5th attempt, and got Gruul to 20% on our 3rd try before calling it a night. I learned a valuable lesson on our 3rd HKM attempt. When going up against bosses that can hit this hard, that first little bit of rage should be spent on Shield Block. Typically I use my Bloodrage for an initial Shield Slam for aggro. Last night, on our 3rd attempt, HKM came along and smacked me for a 9500 crushing blow right out of the gates. Followed by an Arcing Smash and regular melee. He finished me off doing 25k damage in just under 4 seconds. My 18k buffed hp wasn’t enough to survive that opening salvo.

From now on, my first rage spent will be on Shield Block as the boss is incoming. There isn’t much more demoralizing than getting obliterated in the first 5 seconds of a boss fight.

In the end though, we still prevailed. Our guild performed great and we came together to down HKM 2 shots later. We had good attempts on Gruul and he’ll go down the next time we see him.

To wrap up, as noted, we are trying to fill out our roster for 25 mans. If you or anyone you know is interested in having a look at a mature, casual playtime, yet serious when playing guild, take a look at Calzowned

Interesting… My routine in Kara has been pretty much the same as yours. Are you going to change it there too? And taking this new level or requirement for survival into account, do you still plan on stacking more +hit?

I would argue that after getting wrecked in the first 4 seconds that you don’t have the survivability. Sure you got unlucky with a parry thrown in there, but better play beats bad luck 6 days a week and twice on sunday.

I think you are learning the wrong lesson from that experience. When you are in kara, nothing hits as hard as HKM. You should have no problem taking an unlucky crush right off the bat. And trash doesn’t crush in the first place so you have nothing to worry about. You aren’t having trouble getting gibbed in Karazhan (I assume?) so why change your opening sequence?

As for HKM, the lesson is not shield block first, the lesson should be: get more avoidance. Threat on HKM is completely irrelevant. He is the last target so you shouldn’t be concerned with your threat generation at all. That means ditch the block value and hit rating and load up on dodge and parry gears.

More avoidance may or may not have helped there. I could just as easily have gotten crushed with more avoidance. The only thing that would have prevented the crush 100% of the time is Shield Block. Otherwise, you can always get an unlucky round of hits.

Not to mention there isn’t much room in my current setup to get added avoidance. I am pretty much geared out through Kara and gemming for avoidance isn’t something I am interested in at this time.

HKM isn’t a problem as long as I am playing smartly (ie, Shield Block always up, including on initial pull). We regularly 1 shot everything in Kara and I expect to be doing so on HKM and Gruul very soon.

While threat on HKM isn’t typically an issue, leading off with Shield Slam was always my lead move … until now. In hard hitting encounters like this, I will lead off with Shield Block and expect to do just fine =)

But if you take a closer look at your combat log, you will see that you still would have died if you put shield block up. Assuming he parried a regular swing instead of a shield slam, he still hits you 4 times in 4 seconds – the first two attacks get blocked but the third one crushes instead of the first one because shield block is still on cooldown.
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Assume you shield block first and are somehow able to block all 4 attacks, instead of taking the 25,416 dmg, you would have taken 21,937 dmg over 4 seconds. And you received 8,452 in healing which leaves 13,485 in unhealed damage. For an MT at your point in progression, I think 17k hp fully buffed is very good and 18k would be excellent. So with that unhealed damage you are left with 3.5-4.5k. That leaves you with a choice, either you can push your oh-shit buttons a mere 4 seconds into the fight, or you can hope and pray that your healers have a big heal coming your way. Otherwise you are dead on the next swing.
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So in the screen shot, you didn’t get killed becaue you took a crushing blow, you got killed because you got hit 4 times in 4 seconds. So the solution is not to put up shield block first, because it probably would not have saved you anyway. On the other hand, if you had dodged just one of those blows you and your healers would have had a much more comfortable margin.
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p.s. I am totally new to this blog but I like what you are doing. Don’t think I am trying to be an ass, I am just one tank trying to help another.

True, more avoidance would have increased the chance of a dodge, but in the end you can’t get 100% avoidance, meaning that you could still get an unlucky string and get gibbed. The crush could have come at the beginning or the end, leading to my demise either way.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for more avoidance, but at my stage in the game, there’s not a whole lot more I can do =)

Another thing I could have done, and may do on such encounters in the future is also pop trinkets like Moroes’ Pocket Watch to help add some chance of avoidance until we get healing and such smoothly going.

And no worries, I appreciate the commentary, and am always open to suggestions!

You can’t completely eliminate chance in this game no matter what you do. The boss will still hit varying numbers of damage even with 0% crit and shield block and you cannot have shield block up 100% of the time. You can’t get 100% avoidance but you can’t get infinite hp either and as bosses get tougher avoidance will have more and more of an edge in terms of how much damage you can take during the course of a fight. The way I look at it, there’s an amount of stamina needed to be able survive most situations and after getting to that avoidance is the way to go. The required stamina just varies depending on what level you are tanking at…

I must say your blog is my favourite so far of the ones that cover WoW tanking. Thanks. :)

Yes I feel where we may disagree is what that point is at. I’d like to come up with some theorycrafting on that topic since right now I don’t have any real answers.

Looking at a thoroughly geared warrior tank focusing on stamina (Kungen) he seems to have slightly under 20k unbuffed hp so that gives at least an upper bound that you can’t really hope to achieve before you’ve already completed all there is.

Hey Bizzam, interesting discussion going on here. Last night was my first time tanking HKM and Gruul and it seems there are some knowledgeable tanks here that could help me out. I’m pretty new to WoW compared to many, just started at the first of the year. I’ve played my warrior religiously and have been tanking awhile and doing as much reading as i can on how to gear myself, tank rotations, keybindings, macros, you name it. Once I hit 70 i kind of got thrown right into the raiding arena in our guild as our usual warrior tank left suddenly. I’ve been tanking all the way through kara with little to no problems, but still have not gotten all the gear i need (which you can see from my armory). Currently in armory i’m geared for stam, but i can switch out the gun for the Boomstick for more def, and the violet trinket for the adamantite figurine for more def. Do you guys feel i’m undergeared for HKM? We 3 shotted him, however i took a crushing blow in each of the first deaths, the third attempt i popped trinkets from the start and keeped greater stoneshield pots up. I always lead off with shield block on hard hitting mobs like HKM, Nightbane, and Prince and keep it up immediately after cooldown. Our third attempt I didn’t take a crushing and lasted into the Shaman kill at which point i took a 9.5k arcing smash, then another 6k hit to do me in, however our Pally tank immediatly picked him up and luckly only had to tank him through the first phase for a minute or so, with all healers focused on him. So my question is, am i undergeared, or is this the healers fault like my guild keeps saying, i feel that it has to be something i’m doing or not doing. Can you be uncrushable or is this a myth? I’ve read sooo many things on this, some say yes, some say no. I thought you could only be crushed if a mob hits you 3 times successfully in under 5 secs. But i see Bizzam took a crushing on the first hit. Should i stick to tanking kara until i get new boots, belt, chest and trinkets? I am just over 17k hp buffed currently, and in the 16k’s with more avoidance gear on.

Well, the reason I took a crush right off the bat was because I didn’t have shield block =)
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You CAN NOT be 100% crush immune all of the time. You can ONLY be crush immune while shield block is up, which means, yes if you can get hit 3 times in under the 5 seconds you can keep Shield Block up. Parries can also do you in here, hence why all other melee should be attacking from behind the mob.
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As for your gear, you are fine for HKM/Gruul. You can’t really do much better at your level of the game, just keep praying for the [item]Panzar’Thar Breastplate[/item] to drop from Nightbane!